Have you ever had a dog look at you as if you were an idiot? Well last week I did, several times. I traveled to Northern Kentucky for some upland bird shooting with Dad and a few others from home.

To watch a bird dog at work, running back and forth in front of a line of hunters and periodically stopping to raise its snout so that it might better pick up the scent being carried on the wind, is wonderful theater. They are happier working a field even than when their owner returns home after a long day at work; this happiness makes a mockery of the lives that these same breeds of dogs have in city apartments. Just in case I needed a reminder of why having a dog is a bad idea at this point in my life, I got one.

When the dog knows a bird is close, it points—tail straight back, head forward, body rigid—and it will stay that way until the bird flushes. It is a statuesque pose that is developed through substantial training. As the youngest member of the shooting party, it was my task to kick up the bird after one of the dogs pointed. In tall grass, game birds are almost impossible to see and these birds held tight as a survival strategy. This meant I had to trounce through the tall grass kicking about until the bird finally flew up into the air. Whenever this required more than one pass, I looked back at the dog to get my bearings (the dog always pointed towards the strongest smell of the bird) and each time I looked at the dog it was judging me. Can’t you smell it? It’s right there you idiot. I would then go back to thrashing about and eventually the bird would flush and at least one member of the shooting party would get a shot.

In law school, there was befuddlement among some of my classmates when they found out that the late Justice Scalia regularly hunted upland game birds with Justice Kagan. There was a dissonance in their minds about Justice Kagan enjoying the activity; Scalia was too far gone as far as they were concerned. I never asked what their mental holdup was, but I always chalked it up to not appreciating the beauty that is watching a bird dog work a field and not understanding how much fun upland hunting can be. I have only done it a few times myself but now that I have more control over my schedule I expect that number will increase. I plan to not only take many more short trips like this, but also to try entirely new activities both here and elsewhere. That, after all, is one of the reasons I left BigLaw in the first place.